It's Broken, Let's Fix It
The Zeitgeist and Modern Enterprise
It's Broken, Let's Fix It
The Zeitgeist and Modern Enterprise
We used to have this saying:"Ifit ain't broken, don't fix it." That was a pow erful piece of wisdom. It meant: "Ifsomething should, against all odds, func tion properly, then do not touch it, you might make things worse!" But then, the re-engineering fashion emerged, and somebody whom I used to deeply admire as one of the most brilliant teachers I ever saw at work, when he was still an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts In stitute of Technology (MIT), coined the phrase:"Ifit is not broken: break it!" Now that is obvious non-sense on a logical level,but is it on a social level? Society, and thus business, is driven by fashions. Some of us call it fads. There have been more of those than I care to list here. The more colorful, the moreattention it gets.Attention translates more exuberant the statement, the into book salesand lecture fees.But it does not stop there.Very obviously, the more you pay for a speaker, the higher the distribution numbers for his book, the "truer" his message must be! Wewill revisit the "strange loops" caused by recursion often in this book. Let's start with one example. Did I pay a lot for this lecture because it is good, or is it good because it is expensive? One can very easily see a mechanism here that will make us gravitate towards ever louder and shallower truths.
3 Introducing Evolution
4 What Is Capitalism?
5 Contraction and Expansion
6 An Example, a Scenario and Some Thoughts About Them
7 The Enterprise
8 The Enterprise and the World
9 Commerce and Crafts
10 Leadership
11 The Selection Machine
12 Decisions
13 Excellence and Mediocrity
14 Courage and Bureaucracy
15 Pleasing the Stock Market
16 The Almighty Bonus
17 The Cost of Cost Cutting
18 Employees
19 Attention Span
20 Women
21 The Problem with Reality
22 The Moral Side of It All
23 Equilibrium and Symmetry
24 The Problem with Change
25 Fixing the Enterprise
26 Advice to a Young Entrepreneur
References.
1 The Merits of Capitalism
2 Why Was the Winner Victorious?3 Introducing Evolution
4 What Is Capitalism?
5 Contraction and Expansion
6 An Example, a Scenario and Some Thoughts About Them
7 The Enterprise
8 The Enterprise and the World
9 Commerce and Crafts
10 Leadership
11 The Selection Machine
12 Decisions
13 Excellence and Mediocrity
14 Courage and Bureaucracy
15 Pleasing the Stock Market
16 The Almighty Bonus
17 The Cost of Cost Cutting
18 Employees
19 Attention Span
20 Women
21 The Problem with Reality
22 The Moral Side of It All
23 Equilibrium and Symmetry
24 The Problem with Change
25 Fixing the Enterprise
26 Advice to a Young Entrepreneur
References.
DeBeuckelaer, Gerard M.
| ISBN | 978-3-540-67325-5 |
|---|---|
| Medientyp | Buch |
| Copyrightjahr | 2001 |
| Verlag | Springer, Berlin |
| Umfang | XI, 284 Seiten |
| Sprache | Englisch |